Dominions II Review

My god, it's full of stats!

Strategy games are a subtly different beast than the other genres when it comes to how quickly you can dive into things. RPGs come in second, primarily because of an interface and combat style that varies from game to game. First-person shooters, while they vary wildly with visual themes, level design, sound and multiplayer features, are much more immediately immersive. So when a strategy game does not have a tutorial or any introductory features to speak of, it can be slow going.

With Dominions II, figuring out how to set up the game entails a massive amount of reading. While most other turn-based strategy games won't provide more than half a dozen factions to choose from, here you get an avalanche of no fewer than seventeen, each with a wealth of differing statistics. Each faction has different kinds of military units, magic school affiliations, priest types, and a Dominion, which is in this case a unique faction ability, although the word "dominion" is used for two other completely different statistics elsewhere in the game. Each faction has an exhaustive history that can be either interesting or irrelevant, depending on your tastes.

But we're not done yet. You still have to pick your god. In keeping with the theme, you'll have a grand total of thirty-seven at your disposal, each with a different price tag and set of a dozen stats including things like strength, attack and defense, encumbrance, morale, magic resistance, leadership (separate from morale, apparently), and movement. Oh, then there's some random bonus skills you might get, the number of which vary from god to god. Some can fly and are resistance to poison and have bonus movement in mountain terrain. Others can regenerate and are shock resistant and stealthy. All of these bonuses have detailed pop-ups that explain what they are. Some gods have no bonuses.

Then you have the eight magic schools to choose from. Well, you don't choose so much as you buy points in each school, thus increasing the overall setup variety far and above any other game I have ever played. But wait! There's more! You still have to choose your god's Dominion, different from the Faction dominion. This time you have to deal with a set of six arcane scales like a puzzle from a Myst game. I've gone over the descriptions in the manual and in-game, and I'm still not sure how to explain how that stage works. You give your god bonuses, but the scale aspect also introduces random negative events that correspond to the scale you've chosen to add points to.

If you can believe it, this is just the Cliff's Notes introduction to the game. Why did I take the time to write about what you could have discovered yourself within a few minutes of starting up the game? To point out that it takes three fat paragraphs to explain what the hell is going on to someone else. This should not be. It is possible for a strategy game to be too complicated, and Dominions II achieves this dubious goal with flying colors. I even left out the part about choosing your fortress, because really, this is kind of ridiculous.